The best leaders share one thing that has nothing to do with talent. They care about excellence.

Not admire it from a distance or just talk about it. They care about it enough to study it, chase it for themselves, and hold their team accountable to becoming it. That's the differentiator. The constant care and striving to achieve it.

Excellence doesn’t mean flawless; it means being set apart. It’s the result of deliberate progress, not perfection. It’s the combination of small actions executed with intention.

I talked with Ryan Hawk this week, author of The Price of Becoming. He told me about Dave Matthews bartending in Charlottesville before he had a band, watching Carter Beaufort play drums and Leroy Moore play saxophone. He wasn't just impressed; he said: “It was the baddest thing he has ever seen.” Thirty years later, that band still sells out arenas.

If you are the kind of leader who also cares about excellence, it’s worth locking in to learn the framework I built for my Excellence Loop keynote.

Go find examples of excellence. In The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks writes about three zones people live in: the zone of incompetence, the zone of competence, and the zone of excellence. Most people camp out in competence because it's safe and it's enough to get by. But you can't lead your team into a zone you've never seen or experienced. Go watch someone operate at a level you don't yet touch. Let it wreck your definition of good enough.

Define excellence as visible behaviors. A value on the wall doesn't change anything. A specific, observable behavior does. Ryan Hawk has a personal habit to ensure he activates excellence. Three questions, every night.

The questions aren't what changes you. Knowing they're coming is.

Hold yourself and your team to those behaviors, every time. Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow gave a masterclass in season two of Netflix's Quarterback. His team won a game late in the season, but jumped offside eight times doing it. Burrow wasn't celebrating. He told his coach, "I don't care that we won, that wasn't good enough. It wasn't up to our standard."

The moment you accept "good enough," that becomes your new normal. And normal, over time, becomes average.

Use what you learn to raise the behaviors again. Most leaders stop right after the win. Celebrate, move on, forget to ask what it taught them. That's the leak in the loop. What you learn is supposed to provide learnings into what you seek next, sharper and at a higher level than before.

Run the loop once, and you get a good month. Run it on repeat, and you get a team people talk about years later.

So here's the question worth sitting with this week. Do you actually care about excellence, or do you just expect it?

I go deeper on this with Ryan in this week's podcast, including the full story behind The Price of Becoming. The full episode is live now; you can listen to it or check it out on YouTube.

Use your gifts,

John Eades

Founder of LearnLoft | The Sales Infrastructure

Anyone who answers the poll question correctly is entered to win a free copy of the Optimistic Outlook book.

Ryan Hawk has interviewed over 700 high-performing leaders for the Learning Leader Show. When I asked him what separates the ones who sustain excellence over decades, he told me about JJ Redick walking into a room at Duke and seeing a player with "I've arrived" tattooed on his chest.

Redick's response: "You've never arrived. You're always becoming."

Ryan built his new book, The Price of Becoming, around that idea. Not as a hustle-culture platitude, but as three simple questions he asks himself every night:

He calls it "increasing your surface area for luck." The people who seem lucky are usually the ones who quietly stacked days like this for years.

The catch: Ryan admits the highest performers he's studied often struggle to celebrate. They're so wired for "what's next" that they miss the moment they're in. His fix — forcing celebration onto the calendar with people he loves, even when his instinct is to move straight to the next project.

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